Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind—a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time. Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm — and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.
Each strand of Helm has...concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich ... Hall’s work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies ... Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm’s voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you.
A sweeping exploration of the mutual history between human beings and the environment ... Hall proceeds to weave together a dozen or so temporally disparate narratives whose characters have nothing in common beyond their often spiritual interactions with Helm ... Particularly owing to each narrative having a unique literary style, the novel reads like a series of short stories snipped up and patchworked together. There is no overall plot connecting them.
A dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red ... An extraordinary novel ... Pushes both the boundaries of the novel and our relationship with nature.
